Filed under: Motorsports
The ultimate 24 Hours of LeMans web app that you can't use
Unfortunately we won't be in attendance at this year's 24 Hours of LeMans, but Thomas Baekdal made a web application that could make this unfortunate fact a little more bearable, if it only it were legal to for the rest of us to access (see close up screen shots here). Baekdal, who admits to not even liking sports in general save for this one race, wanted a web app that could outdo TV coverage in its breadth of information provided and immediacy. He's developing his own application to pull data from Lemans.org and Club24 and display it on a rather attractive screen that puts you right in the action. When it's finished, Baekdal expects it will provide the following real-time data of the race.
- Live News
- The exact Le Mans time
- Lap times
- Lap position
- Race events
- Picture, web cams
- Background information
Thanks for the tip, Eliot!
[Source: Baekdal.com]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
foo 7:58PM (5/30/2007)
umm can he accidentally post the app somewhere :)
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Dr. Greenthumb 8:11PM (5/30/2007)
I'm going to be blindly staring at my television for how many hours that Speed will bless us with.
Things on my to do list before I "Buy the Farm":
Attend the 24 heurs Du Mans
Attend the TT races on the Isle of Man
Attend F1 Race in Monte Carlo
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Matt 10:36PM (5/30/2007)
Greenthumb, I agree with those man. I also want to attend the MotoGP and F1 Grand Prixs here in the states as well.
Thanks to stupid exclusivity rights...can they just accept that (since it does pull the application from their site already), and just make it free. Maybe he can develop some place for them to display ads. I'd be willing to look at an ad on the right every once in a while.
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epp_b 11:27PM (5/30/2007)
Stupid morons and their "thought crime" perceptions...
If they publicize it on their website, it's available to anyone for any purpose (hence the term, "publicize", the root of which is "public"). It doesn't matter whether the client requesting the data is a human using a web browser or a bot collecting and parsing data. If they can't be bothered to technically enforce their polices on their own website (which is entirely possible), they really shouldn't be able or allowed to rely on "thought crime" laws.
To say anything else is to condone the collapse of the Internet.
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Thomas Baekdal 3:29AM (5/31/2007)
Hey everyone,
Thanks for the post! I totally agree with you on the copyright issues (but no, I cannot "accidently post it somewhere" :o)).
The Le Mans Application is basically just a browser (although controlled with bot like behavior). To bad A.C.O. (the organization behind Le Mans) doesn't see it that way.
A Race Application is something that we need from all kinds of motorsport. Nascar, F1, WRC, MotoGP - you name it.
Volvo Ocean Race 2005 featured the "Visual Spectator", why can't we have something similar in motorsport.
http://www.volvooceanrace.org/gameanddownloads/virtualspectator/
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Jay Evans 9:30AM (5/31/2007)
From the Legal Terms of the site.
"You are only granted permission to reproduce elements of the content in digital form on your computer for the purpose of viewing pages which are consulted by your browser."
I suspect they are more concerned with an app like this sucking up bandwidth by constantly accessing the site. A few people doing it would be fine. A few thousand would probably crash the site. Almost a DoS attack.
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Brad 10:34AM (5/31/2007)
Unfortunately, LeMans is once again on same weekend as the USGP so I will be watching the coverage Saturday night from my hotel room in Indiana.
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Thomas Baekdal 3:38PM (5/31/2007)
I have made a "light version" that doesn't use my servers or manipulate the original data. It is not as pretty though...
http://www.baekdal.com/notes/personal/Le-mans-2007-web-application
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